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Since Britain voted for Brexit there has been much talk about the possibility of a new ‘anti-Brexit’ party that would seek to fill the centre ground of British politics.

Such a party, argue its advocates, would appeal to both pro-Remain Conservatives who feel cut adrift by the rightward turn of their party, as well as to pro-Remain Labour supporters who have been disheartened by Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance of the Brexit result.

‘The Democrats’ party

In recent days, this idea has gathered pace through the tweets of James Chapman, a former political editor at the Daily Mail and special advisor to the nation’s Brexit secretary David Davies.

Chapman has claimed that his plan to launch such a party (tentatively titled The Democrats) has garnered interest among top flight politicians and excited Remainers in social media who often point to Emmanuel Macron in France as an example of how they too can ‘break the mould’ of Britain’s two party system.

‘Fundementally flawed’

Yet the idea is fundamentally flawed.

New political parties are always tempting but in Britain they face not one but several major hurdles. Our ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system means that it is almost impossible for new parties to win seats.

UKIP, for example, was only able to win two seats due to the defection of existing Conservatives (and even then went on to lose one of them at the following general election). Without these defections the party consistently struggled to get even into the 20-30 per cent territory.

Then there is the issue of concentrated support. To overcome first past the post a new party needs lots of supportive voters in the same places.

A new anti-Brexit party would face two big problems. First, the most strongly anti-Brexit seats in the country already have thumping majorities for the Labour Party. Unless a large number of Labour MPs are about to defect this will make it almost impossible for a new party to get anywhere.

Second, even if an anti-Brexit party were to target these areas there is no guarantee that it would be able to win them.

Put it this way, if UKIP could not even capture seats like Boston and Skegness, where 75% voted to leave the EU, then why would an anti-Brexit party capture pro-Remain seats like Hornsey and Wood Green, Bristol West or Streatham?

Vulnerability of the centre

There is another hurdle, too.

Centrist parties are notoriously vulnerable because their support tends to be spread more thinly across the electorate rather than concentrated in specific clusters.

This is one reason why, historically, the Liberal Democrats struggled to win a large number of seats outside of the Celtic fringe and why an attempt to launch a new party in the 1980s, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), ultimately ended in failure (even if the SDP did lay a foundation for the eventual emergence of New Labour).

Macron: a false idol

The Macron comparison is similarly misleading.

Macron was able to win in France because the left had totally collapsed and the right was embroiled in a corruption scandal. This left Marine Le Pen as the only alternative.

Britain is completely different. We have a newly resurgent Labour Party and a Conservative Party that just won its strongest vote since 1983. Sure, politics is volatile. But people also said that in the 1980s when the SDP tried and then failed to breakthrough.

These problems are underlined by broader points about the Brexit debate. Even the most extreme interpretation of opinion polls suggests that only around one in four voters would be open to the idea of overturning the vote for Brexit.

Even if they themselves do not like the result, a majority of voters accept that it needs to be respected, while new research this week has also shown that most are more supportive of a hard rather than soft Brexit.

The problem of ‘cross pressure’

Then there is also the fact that the key demographic groups for such a party –younger and pro-Remain 18-45 year olds are what academics call “cross pressured”.

They are not just worried about Brexit but schools, the NHS, their kids and paying the mortgage.

Ultra Remainers like Chapman are gambling on an economic crash pushing these voters out of the mainstream but if they are not prepared to take a risk on Brexit why would they take a risk by lending their vote to a new party that would appeal to have little chance of breaking through? My money would be on most of these voters remaining with Labour.

It was once said that new parties often shoot up like a rocket but then quickly fall out of the sky like a stick. Many have tried and failed. If angry Remainers do flock to a new anti-Brexit party then in my view they too will discover just how hard it is to overcome the many hurdles that lay in wait in the British party system.

Matthew Goodwin is professor of politics at the University of Kent and a senior fellow of Chatham House

Prince Philip’s car crash illustrates how the rest of us pay for the recklessness of the privileged

BBC treats Diane Abbott and other Corbyn allies with contempt. We need to reform the media now

McDonald's must stop breeding chickens so fast that their organs fail

Newspapers are mocking Beautiful Boy, but it is the first film which accurately reflects what I have been through with addiction

If Theresa May calls another election, prepare for a ‘short and sharp’ manifesto

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